Olga Tokarczuk (b. 1962) is one of the most popular contemporary writers in Poland. By training a psychologist, she is based in Wałbrzych. She has on multiple occasions won the Reader's Prize of the NIKE literary award. A prize winning play has also been based on Prawiek i Inne Czasy. Her novel House of day, House of Night is available from Granta and Northwestern University Press. She has published a long essay about Boleslaw Prus' 19th century classic, The Doll. Her most recent book is Bieguni

Agnieszka Wolny-Hamkało: When preparing to write "Anna In in the catacombs", did you research the original sources and the location?

Olga Tokarczuk: Writing this short book was a completely new experience. Firstly, I had a very clear outline of the novel. Of course there were holes in it, in some places it was unintelligible, but nevertheless it was there. I also had the feeling that my writer's ego would have to be kept on a tight rein, that I'd have to treat myself as an instrument to transmit this story to the present day. But on the other hand to transmit to the present day would be to transmit this ancient myth via my own sensitivity and temperament. There is no other way to do it. In a certain sense my role was to serve the story. I tried to make use of all my knowledge. So I did what for me was a fair amount of 'research', although this word is not quite right. It was rather searching, full of enthusiasm, for anything that had a link with Inanna, with the Sumerians, with mythology, with the psychology of myth in general. I funded a little research project of my own and even if only a small amount of it found itself on paper, I still really enjoyed this literary archaeology.


You started as a poet and you still pay very close attention to language. In "Anna In" the language is unusually metaphorical, substantial.

I still think, rather old-fashionedly, that language is always only a tool for opening boxes of images. My temperament is prosaic, I feel as if storytelling has its own energy, which can manage to soar by itself and is sometimes independent of the author. It's the whole pleasure of writing. I tried to ensure a rhythm was present, which again was part of doing justice to the language of the original text, which was undoubtedly intended to be recited and sung.

The men in your book are not portrayed very encouragingly: cowardly, weak, capricious. The women direct the fate of the world. Again people will conclude that Tokarczuk is a feminist.

We should remember, that this is one of the oldest myths we know of. One could suppose that it relates the transitional moment in the history of civilisation, when the matriarchal structure of society was replaced with the patriarchal. Of course it was a long process. So we have in the story of Inanna the remains of primeval beliefs, when the world was ruled by Goddesses – Magna Mater – and people lived on primitive agriculture. It is said that about 5,000 years before our era a great change took place, that the population grew so much that the environment was not able to sustain them. Shepherding appeared, people started to migrate to find pastures, and met with other peoples, with whom they fought over land. The world of the Goddesses became anachronistic, and couldn't find a place for itself in this new situation, their role being taken over by more aggressive, male deities. The female deities turned into demons, witches and monsters, and women deprived of divine protection started to fill subordinate functions, and this process has really continued to modern times. In Christianity for 1500 years it was considered that women didn't have souls. Souls were finally granted to us at the Council of Trent in the 16th century. The myth of Inanna relates the tensions of the former civilisation during a period of transition. And it's true – my interpretation is in a certain sense an attempt at a feminist restoration.

The book is a futuristic fantasy. Stanisław Lem would be enchanted!

Absolutely, it has aspects of fantasy, of cyberpunk. I associate it with a kind of literary graphic novel. The action is fast paced, the characters are vivid.

What did your imagination draw on to produce such an unusual book?

My inspiration came from the beautiful original Sumerian texts. It's great literature. My first way into it was originally the Epic of Gilgamesh, the moving story of a failed attempt to overturn the divine order, in which every living thing is condemned to death. Both of these stories, of Inanna and then later of Gilgamesh, show us people who lived thousands of years ago, but differ from us, fundamentally, very little.

KATARZYNA KUBISIOWSKA: Can you remember the first events in your life that made you aware of death?

OLGA TOKARCZUK: Nothing dramatic. Old family photos, evidence for people's absence. I realised that behind every person stands a crowd of the dead, from whom we descend, that the world we know is a continuation of worlds which have passed. What seems to be permanent and concrete, is in reality fleeting and momentary. I would stare for hours at the small old blurry photos in my grandmother's house. It's probably a natural start of the meeting with death. What comes first is always the death of others. It doesn't yet apply to us.

In a sense it does apply to us, but by the process of ageing. In "Final Stories" you describe in detail the bodies of ageing women, which are a kind of inverse image of the eternally youthful, efficient and effective superwoman, or perhaps better to say the 'supergirl' defined by modernity.

Life is the most patient preparation for death – the deaths of loved ones, and in the end the constant lessons which our own bodies give. The principal characters are women, but they are above all people. Your reading disturbs me a little. Is it possible that a female writer, writing about women, might be writing about people in general? If I were a man, it would easier to defend the book as universal. The fact that I am a woman puts it in a different light, brings forward different questions and emphasises a different type of interpretation. Questions about women's literature, about feminism, the body, even if straightforward and innocent, force me to explain myself in terms of my gender, which isn't asked of male writers. The maleness of literature is accepted as a certainty, as obvious. The culture within which I live is male-centric, it's a fact which one must simply accept with sadness. A writing woman is continually something out of the ordinary, eccentric.

Coming back to the theme of death, which in "Final Stories" fills every scene. The description of birth recalls dying. A woman looks at the death of her child, later her husband, Maja looks at the death of Kisz and the decaying bodies of turtles. Ida looks at the death of a dog, and this animal death seems to be her death, the dog teaches the human the art of dying.

It is a book about death, I thought of it like this from the beginning. It talks about human rituals in the face of death – not only in the third person, death as something objective, but also the death that touches the second person, of someone close, someone grieved over. You, but in the end your own death. Taking this point of view is also to encompass the other, 'ordinary' death. Life is overgrown with death.

Where did the idea come from to show a person's death in the way it was experienced by Ida?

This idea has a long history. It's a type of more or less specific instructions for crossing to the other side. We know versions of this from Egyptian and Tibetan literature. In the middle ages it functioned as ars bene moriendi, the art of dying well. In Polish literature it probably never appeared in its pure form, but we remember "The conversation of Mr Polikarp with Death" or "The Complaint of the Dying", a very strange poem, whose verses start with each letter of the alphabet. I used these forms, somewhat loosely, in the second part of the book. But it's above all a folk tale, in which the soul of the hero sets out on the road (becoming conscious stage by stage of his own death), and who in the end realises that he is already on the other side. It's a small, somewhat forgotten literary genre. Forgotten, because death too is dismissed, hidden, reduced to a secret moment, at the most made public in an obituary and a de-ritualised funeral. Few treat death today as a process, a passage, as opposed to some kind of dramatic moment.

In Buddhism, the dead person, for a period after their death is convinced they are still alive. This motif is used in more and more film screenplays such as 'Jacob's Ladder', 'Mulholland Drive', 'The Sixth Sense', 'The Others'. Maybe these conceptions are a modern equivalent of the middle-ages ars bene moriendi? Maybe they now give us lessons about dying?

I think so, yes. The popularity of Eastern philosophy changes somewhat the perspective from which we look at many things, which in our culture were neglected, unmentionable or overlooked. Including death. The idea of bardo made us aware, as people of the West, of the depth and sense - how to describe it? - of the culture of dying. Although the Western equivalent of bardo appears in the tales of souls who, after the death of the body, return to the earth in order to avenge wrongs, settle scores, to prepare for the final departure.

Living in the countryside habituates one to death. Here it is easy to see disintegration and transience. People are not afraid of the dead and don't fear what happens after death. Urban civilisation strips death of its reality, as well as its metaphysical dimension.

But today an inhabitant of a metropolis encounters death daily via the media. It's full of death, but in a very abstract, again intangible form, as information, as an image. And again it is a distant, other form of death. Death has been fragmented on the one hand into an abstract event, by the media. On the other hand biological death has become dying in hospital, where a person is on a respirator, stoned on drugs. Between the two there is no place for the death of the person, the human, with their past, memories, individuality. Nobody "helps" us to die, nobody teaches this to us. It seems that there is only life, young and healthy, and then suddenly nothing. Old age is always ugly, horrible, deserving of sympathy. Deprived of all dignity. Especially the old age of women.

You employ some fairly eccentric literary devices, at least in 'Parki', the second part of "Final Stories", where letters are traced out in the snow - the message to the world that Petr is dead.

That's a true story. I often have the feeling that reality is too explicit, even in bad taste because of its arrogance and lack of moderation. Despite appearances, if writers could create reality, it would look so much more balanced and predictable. That's why it is so difficult these days to write realistically. I heard the story of an old woman tracing the announcement of her husbands death in the snow a few years go. In fact, it was supposed to have happened near Lewin Kłodzki. I decided to keep the location too, which helped me to place the first two parts of "Final Stories" in Kotlina Klodzka.

You raise in this book the problem of reducing suffering. Do you support euthanasia?

Yes. Situations exist which can't be subordinate to the law. I consider that a person has the moral right to decide the moment of their own death and to die in dignity. I would like to have that right, and I would like others to have it too.

For people of faith euthanasia is a barbaric interference in the divine order.

Not necessarily. Many people of faith support euthanasia. They believe that God created them as free beings, who are responsible of their own choices.

Animals appear in all your books, treated with particular respect. What role do they play in your life?

Travelling companions. Commentators on events. Another viewpoint. Other, new dimensions of closeness and belonging. A wealth of dissimilarities. New languages of communication. Uncommon learning. Everyday humour. Basic, fundamental, peace. Cats – natural meditation. At home, I have a kind of inter-species community which although it’s subject to tensions, manages to co-exist peacefully and companionably. It does one good to be part of something like that. I suspect that we render services to each other which are difficult to define, not only those that are specifically to do with housekeeping. Dogs living with people become humanised, their personality becomes richer. People who are in contact with animals become similarly enriched. It's a deep mutual learning and connection. Who knows, perhaps it's exactly animals who can teach us how to die with dignity. I brought this idea into "Final Stories". But there's also the case, that for the "internet surfer" the animal world, nature in general, can become something threatening and strange, something horrible.

"Final Stories" is made up of stories about three related women of different ages. All of them have unsuccessful marriages behind them. At first glance this would appear to be the consequence of a "genetic" disposition, that from generation to generation the mother transmits the pattern condemning them to disasters in their private lives. But after a careful reading, in each of these stories we find that it's not a question of inheritance, but rather a question of irreconcilable differences between the sexes.

I wouldn't say that they are unsuccessful marriages. I'd rather call them difficult relationships. Easy, happy relationships only exist in Harlequin romance novels.
I don't think that all the differences between men and women are cultural, but definitely the majority are. They are so strongly beaten into our heads that we take them to be natural. The differences between men and women don't interest me. Between people, very much so. These are so numerous, they are worth examining. People have, for example, very different political and religious preferences, they can even kill for these reasons, they have dramatically different visions of the world, rhythms of life, tastes. They are different on many levels. A lack of understanding affects the characters in "Final Stories". The result of this is loneliness, maybe the most widespread feeling today, but also separation, drifting, surfing across life.
I recently watched the film "The Village". The most fascinating for me was not the horrific aspect, but the life of a small community, cut off from the world, relying on each other, close knit, I envied it – the community was made up of "a place for everyone" whether they were gifted or disabled. I realise that this is to a certain degree a utopian myth applied to times "before", before industrialisation, two cruel wars, globalisation. And I also realised, to what extent it is still very attractive.
Loneliness in a small world is something to be overcome, to be alleviated. In a wider world without borders – it blurs and dissipates people, they become vulnerable to all kinds of attraction, spin and manipulation, they lose their sense of orientation. Unconsciously they nevertheless need rituals, something that will enable them to face up to death. They perform lame, incomplete rituals, without being aware of it. Because it's not possible to live in perpetual suspension, a person has to tell their story, define themselves. This is exactly the position of the main character in the last story in the book.

In your early books it's difficult to detect any traces of your personal experience. In "House of Day, House of Night", you vividly open the door to your autobiographical sources, and in "Final Stories" there are three characters called Olga. What do they have in common with you?

How would it be possible to write a book without relying on your own experience? It's a question of referring to it, either directly or indirectly. All of my characters take something from me, are in some sense me. Even if they don't come out of my experience, they are nevertheless seen through my eyes. Maybe they are presentiments of me, possibilities, potential versions of me. I always understand my writing to be very personal, a very intimate statement directed at the reader, I narrate my world to them and count on them to find a place for it in their world, so we can make it somehow mutual. If I manage to do this, the book lives, if not, it dies. Sometimes it gets through only to a small group.

Agnieszka Wolny-Hamkało: You said once that you had an 'episodic consciousness' and that the short story was a more natural literary form for you. What is an 'episodic consciousness'?

Olga Tokarczuk: It's built like a bee's eye, it's made up of individual pictures, which a person then merges together. Neurologists say that we all perceive the world like this. The classical novel is in this context an artificial creation, because it attempts to give linearity to perception.

And so your most recent prose runs in many different directions.

Every time I set out to write a novel, I am aware that it is artificial. So I search out ways of storytelling that seem closer to our experience, our emotions. The way I talk in 'Runners' seems realistic to me. That's how the world looks: made up of individual observations. Of things that don't fit together. Most of all the world today of a person who is always moving. One has to use a fragmented form, nervous, shattered. I trust the reader. I bet on the fact that they are similar to me, and that they are smart.

Who are the Runners?

A metaphor for the modern traveller. The name 'Bieguni' comes from a sect of orthodox Old Believers, who treated movement as a sacred state. Permanently moving, crossing borders meant for them not belonging to anything and an escape from evil, which tries to take away their freedom.

Are you a Runner?

A Runner is a nomad. Maybe it's the case that we all have within us the memory of our ancestors who were nomadic. And the settled civilisation, within which we build ourselves nests, oppresses people.

For some time now travelling without restrictions has become normal for Poles. How does the identity change of someone who suddenly becomes a traveller?

There have been books written by philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists on this subject. I have relied on my intuition and participant observation. I'm not talking only about tourism, a tourist is one kind of Runner. For me a better example would be a tramp, and everyone who has fallen out of the stable order. Social, psychological or symbolic. I tried to create a kind of literary monograph of this phenomenon.

What is required in order to be able to travel so spontaneously?

We probably don't realise how painful the closure of the borders was under communism. We remember the political oppression, the poor standard of living, but this inability to escape has weighed down psychologically on two generations. Today we treat this openness as an exceptional novelty. But after all the world was open up to the First Word War. Now we are really returning to that situation, except the technological ease of travel is far greater. As well as the tourist there are many other kinds of traveller. People who are more interested in "being on the move" than getting to a destination, vagabonds of a kind. Or those who go off to the other side of the world in order to see some particular object, talk for half an hour with someone, to pray in front of a particular statue. This kind of traveller looks down on the tourist, who for them are deplorable representatives of the middle classes. The tourist in turn looks down on the dirty hippy who backpacks through Pakistan without any money.

I have the impression that representatives of the modern tribes of Runners are not fully in touch with reality. They waste their days on air travel, they change their names. They become ghosts. Is this their aim – to be detached from reality?

I think so. This kind of travelling is a deep challenge to the world in which we live, which tries to keep us in place, give us a name, a surname, a social security number and says: your place is here, this is your role. Contesting this world, what Runners call being pinned down, being caught by Satan, they negate the identity created by the expectations of others. On a journey one falls quickly into a "liquid identity", a person gains freedom from themselves.

That's disturbing. Fleeing from reality.

What disturbs me is something else – we live under our surnames on this or that street. But nevertheless we are greater than our names, our addresses. Everybody somehow feels this unconsciously. Something small has been given to us, within which we have to live. We are an enormous energy closed up in a nutshell. To travel is to break open this microworld.

Nevertheless this complete detachment, uprooting seems frightening and sad to me. When one is not trying for something, not looking for anything. A feeling of absolute virtuality. One would need to find something to hold on to.

I've been in this situation a few times, being nowhere, and there was no sadness in it.

In the book there are reproductions of beautiful maps looking like arteries, nerves, blood vessels.

Maps immediately seemed to be an essential part of the book. As I was writing I had with me many strange and curious maps, which I had discovered in Holland. The transference of a three-dimensional world to flat maps fascinated me. It's like writing: you try to capture something multi-dimensional, a cornucopia of colours – and to put it on paper, press it into language. This book would not have been possible without maps. They show what a huge metaphysical similarity exists in the structure of what is large and small around us: the macro and micro. This equivalence, which fascinated Renaissance thought, is still not an an idea we are accustomed to in modern thought, despite the great progress in science.

Does modern travel have something in common with the Enlightenment idea of a voyage as a university of life?

These days much more important than acquiring knowledge is seeing things that amaze us. The Enlightenment concept of the acquisition of knowledge has grown stale. What is this knowledge for? Are we going to save it? Zip it and write it to a disk? It's no longer important what I know, but the meaning of what I know. The books is also about this. What do we get out of the fact that we have found out about Florence? Is something within us changed when we know which architect designed it? These days people should travel in order to see to what extent we are enclosed within our own imagination. That for example four hundred kilometres to the East there are people with a completely different sense of time or think about marriage differently, or declare their love for each other differently. It's important to see that many of the values we think are absolute are relative, are simply customs.

Are we anthropocentric?

We are. And also xenophobic.
It’s a wonderful thing to send children who have finished school to travel around the world. So that they will see what is different. Knowledge one can pick up from the internet, universities and the well equipped libraries in one's hometown.

People travel on business or to relax, but your characters travel with, odd, unclear or absurd aims. What drives them?

The demon of movement, the restlessness of the traveller. Why did Columbus, Vespucci, or Marco Polo set off? Maybe they had a rational aim, but in reality they didn't know what they were supposed to discover. Now we go to the Parises, Jerusalems, Dublins we know from books, myths and films, in order to see if they really exist.

"Runners" tells the story of people you have met while travelling: in air terminals, stations, in foreign towns. You are like a medium, who brings together these stories in a coherent form.

I often feel like that. The role suits me: an ear and an eye, someone undefined, without gender, without an age. Someone who is not too distinct, and that's why the world trusts them. When you withdraw from your own "I", you start to see and hear more. When you are too distinct, you see the world through your own filters, which is not bad either, just different.

You wrote that a woman at a certain age becomes invisible, becomes a ghost and can listen into others conversations with impunity.

In our culture women are "visible" only for a certain period of their lives, when they are attractive, according to norms of beauty and attractiveness, "womanly". After fifty or sixty, they slowly disappear, they fade. Nobody is especially interested in them. Neither glossy magazines, politicians, nor the media. But unseen does not mean – unobservant. It's a paradoxically privileged role: an outsider, who sees things that go unnoticed, being in the midst of the whole confusion.

Can people tell their stories?

It's rather that people are told by their stories.

Review in the Guardian:

Tokarczuk’s prose is simple and unadorned. She tells her stories with a natural fluency that easily accommodates the hopes, drudgery and absurdities of the world she is describing. Real lives mingle with the imagined, dreams with day, past with present in an entirely plausible way. A lot of nasty things happen and many people die but the tone is by no means gloomy in tone. As Marta, the voice of folk wisdom in the book, points out: ‘If death were nothing but bad, people would stop dying immediately.’ House of Day, House of Night opens its doors on a very fresh and vibrant Polish talent.

Shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2004.